The pony skull I bought for £1

I was hoping to write about the Times magazine feature on kid bloggers today, but it isn't in the magazine today so it must be in  next week. So instead I'm writing about this which is the pony skull I bought about a month ago on eBay.

I don't buy a lot of skulls on eBay but this one was special and a real bargain. Only one other person was bidding on it. I was prepared to pay £10 but I only had to pay £1.04 and about £5 postage.

 I don't know why it was so cheap, but it might have been because half the braincase was missing. But horse skulls are so rare I thought I would buy it anyway.

The seller didn't say what had happened to it but it looked like it had a bad injury which killed it. This is what the top of the skull looked like with the suture lines. The crack on the left is a suture line but the crack on the right (and the line that goes across) is damage.

Ths skull was quite clean but it had these yellow grease spots from the fat in the flesh.

These are the holes where the six incisors (front teeth) go. Horses are different to deer, cows and sheep because horses have both top and bottom incisors, and sheep, cows and deer have just bottom incisors. You can see one of the incisors (the i3) just emerging.

This pony has three premolars visible with another tooth emerging which could either be a pre-molar or a molar. This is another sign it was a young animal, but you can tell that from the size (it's 32cm long, which is big for an animal skull, but small for a horse) and from the sutures which aren't properly joined yet. You can also see how small it is by comparing the size with the ancient horse jaw I found.

This is how it looks like from the back where the braincase and nasal turbines (thin bones inside the nose) are missing.

The teeth are already smooth and look worn down compared to the teeth of sheep or deer. But these are only the baby (milk) teeth which will get pushed out and replaced. The first pre-molar (on the right) is quite big. You can see the rings of dentine and enamel.

This was a great bargain ! Soon I want to write a blog post on how to buy great skulls on eBay.

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